Key features in Umbraco 8
Speed
The release of Umbraco 8 sees the entire codebase scrubbed up and extended; based on the many years of contributor input and empirical knowledge of the existing Umbraco 7 codebase in the field.
Languages
No more workarounds, hacks, and syncing with external packages. In Umbraco 8, management of language variants is an integral part of the CMS.
Users can easily create, update and manage multilingual content in a simple, intuitive fashion.
New ‘built-in’ features such as the side-by-side editing view, the ability to switch between languages in preview mode for easy comparison, and the possibility of setting up mandatory languages and fallback languages are just some of the new features make it simpler to work with multilingual content in Umbraco 8.
Segmentation
The ability to change site content based on the current user!
Optimise content for users!
Consider different content depending on a user’s platform i.e. Mobile or Desktop or a user’s location or how a user has navigated the site to date!
Content Apps
A ‘Content App’ is anything related to content creation in Umbraco, examples of such functionality could be the integration of Google Analytics into content views, the integration of page scoring in line with SEO data requirements, image filtering directly in page.
Infinite editing
Creating content in digital solutions is becoming less of a linear process and increasingly a composition of reusable blocks configured for different purposes. Infinite Editing is Umbraco’s term for their solution to this conundrum.
In simple terms it means you can stay in one place within the CMS and call in the assets required to create given content within the CMS without having to go over to the media library, say, in order to pre-create and edit assets.
The interactions take place within overlays in the same place.
Key Features in Umbraco
For Content Managers
Forms
Umbraco provides a superb form creator that is easy to use and fully integrate into workflows – including email receipts, email templates, webservices, CRM integrations.
Forms reporting is built in together with data export to allow for greater analysis in other 3rd party packages such as Excel or Google Spreadsheets.
User roles and permissions
A mature and flexible user roles and permissions implementation affording granular flexibility to privileges across operations and content types. User roles and permissions are applied to users of the CMS
Membership
As distinct from User roles and permissions. Members are front end website members – Members can be grouped (and as such assigned roles) so as to allow or deny access to specified site areas, pages and content.
Workflow
Through the application of User roles and permissions a publishing workflow can be implemented. Certain users may be gifted creation and update of content only, i.e. without publish privilege. Umbraco can send notification to other Umbraco users who are gifted with the Publish privilege.
Leveraging this method allows the control of published content on site by the appropriate personnel.
Content Search
Umbraco’s built in content search within the CMS is based upon Examine, an excellent and widely used search and index implementation across the internet. The same facilities are exposed in order to be able create excellent search facilities on the front-end website.
Document and Media Management
Organise your documents and images on site the Media Library. Implement folders and hierarchies of assets just like you would on your own PC.
Content Tags
Umbraco provides a tagging mechanism for grouping content (such as within blogs)
Taxonomy
Taxonomy implementation can be through simple tagging or hierarchically through developer implantation.
Content Versioning and Rollback
Umbraco’s content versioning and rollback facilities are excellent – highlighting version differences for preview before electing to roll back.
Scheduled Publishing
Scheduled publishing is built in
Analytics / SEO etc.
There are content apps available for analysis within the CMS, however – obviously – it is also simple to install Google Tag Manager on site.
Key Features in Umbraco
For Developers & Designers
Open Source
Umbraco is licensed with the MIT license (http://umbraco.com/products/license)
Developers are free to use and customize.
Microsoft.NET Framework
Scaling and performance guaranteed!
MVC implementation.
Standards
No restrictions on front end implementation, start with a clean sheet and code to standards.
Headless
What is Headless?
Headless is a content management solution, built from the ground up, that provides operations only related to content – i.e. Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD).
Crucially Headless has no methods relating to content presentation. It is merely a distributor of functions via an API which can perform CRUD operations.
In this way Headless enables you to power other types of websites with Umbraco such as Single Page Application or websites running on a different platform than .NET.
Extensibility and Integrations
The fact that Umbraco offers API access (weather Headless or not) and that it’s base architecture allows a true MVC approach to implementations beyond its core makes it ideal for extensibility and integrations.
For example, we have leveraged the Umbraco CMS to provide and display - within a responsive website - non sensitive standard content ONLY (e.g. section titles, introductory texts, button texts etc.) for a complex call system whose key interactions revolve around reliable and secure communications with a third-party API integration. It is the 3rd party API that performs the key, sensitive messaging between users and a secure system. Thus, no sensitive data is ever stored within the Umbraco CMS.
Multi-Channel Content
Thus – as a natural consequence of Headless (but also from the full Umbraco CMS if required) you and your developers get full control over data, output and delivery. This means that you can use Umbraco to power anything from Responsive Websites and Mobile Apps to Digital Signage and IOT devices. You can leverage pure Headless of expose content operations from within the full Umbraco CMS via the built in API.
Cloud and Azure Support
Umbraco can be installed on Umbraco’s own cloud infrastructure or independently on an Azure instance.
For all Umbraco installations we recommend the implementation of a true and safe development and publishing environment. This requires a local developer instance, a development server instance, a staging server instance and a live site server instance.
This environment allows for safe functional development, approval and deployment together with safe content creation, approval and publication.
Drop us a line if you need any further info, advice or support from our expert Umbraco certified developers
